Keywords:

Abstract.

Many previous societies have killed themselves off and, in the
process, devastated their environments. Perhaps the most famous of
these is that of “Easter Island”. This suggests a grand challenge
for the agent community: that of discovering what kinds of rationality
and/or coordination mechanisms would allow humans and the greatest
possible variety of other species to coexist. In particular, solving this
challenge consists of designing and releasing a society of plausible
agents into a simulated ecology and assessing: (a) whether the agents
survive and (b) if they do survive, what impact they have upon the
diversity of other species in the simulation. The simulated ecology
needs to implement a suitably dynamic, complex and reactive environment
for the test to be meaningful. Agents, as any other entity have to eat
other entities to survive, but if they destroy the species they depend
upon they are likely to die off themselves. Up to now there has been
a lack of simulations that combine a complex model of the ecology with a
multi-agent model of society. A suitable dynamic ecological model and
simple tests with agents are described to illustrate this challenge.

An Associated paper entitled "An Individual-Based Model of the Impact
of Human Beings on an Ecosystem", which explore the properties of
this particular model in greater depth can be found at http://cfpm.org/multipatch/cpmrep222.html